Season 8 Ep 4: Sally Ride's Star Power

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride made history when she became the first American woman to travel to space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. She would also make history in another way. Buckle up for this deep dive into Sally Ride’s life and legacy!

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Deb Fowler: Hello, and welcome to UnErasing LGBTQ History and Identities — A Podcast.  I’m Deb Fowler, co-founder of History UnErased. 

Sally Ride orbited our Earth in 1983, breaking barriers and inspiring millions - especially young girls that they, too, can reach for the stars. Buckle up for this deep dive into Sally Ride’s life and legacy … take it away, Kathleen! 

Kathleen Barker: On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride made history when she became the first American woman to travel to space aboard the Shuttle Challenger. She would also make history in a different way, as the first LGBTQ astronaut, although this particular aspect of Ride’s identity wouldn’t be revealed to the public until after her death in 2012. 

Sally Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in Encino, California. Her father, Dale, taught social studies at Santa Monica Junior High, and later became a political science professor at Santa Monica City College. Ride’s mother, Joyce, was active in the Presbyterian Church and volunteered as a counselor at a women's correctional facility. As a child, Ride loved to play sports. She learned how to play baseball from her paternal grandfather, Andy. She was a huge Dodger fan, and dreamed of playing shortstop for the team. She took her first tennis lessons in 1962, and she excelled quickly. She was actually a nationally ranked player as a teenager, so good that the legendary Billie Jean King urged her to go pro. She didn’t know it then, but Sally would meet the love of her life while playing tennis as a teenager. 

Sally Ride was an inquisitive student, so curious that she literally couldn’t wait to learn. She skipped the fifth grade after testing ahead of her peers in math and reading. Sally didn’t just like science, she lived it. Her parents bought her a chemistry set so she could run experiments at home. By 12, she had her own microscope. Before most kids were flipping through comics or magazines, Sally was reading Scientific American. How many middle schoolers can say that?

 And then there was the night sky. She was fascinated with the moon and the stars. Out in her backyard, using a telescope her parents gave her, Sally explored lunar craters and stars, building a connection to space long before she imagined going there.

Fast forward to high school. Her favorite class was physiology, taught by Dr. Elizabeth Mommaerts, who clearly saw something special in Ride. Here’s where a great teacher changes everything: during Sally’s senior year, Mommaerts encouraged her to try a college-level class at UCLA. The class title? Physics for Poets. By graduation, Sally Ride had made her decision: physics was her path. And as we all know, that path would eventually take her a lot farther than her backyard telescope ever could.

In 1968, Ride was off to college. She accepted a tennis scholarship to Swathmore, where she also played on the field hockey and women’s basketball teams! Pennsylvania was a long way from California, though, and Sally grew homesick. She left Swarthmore after a year and a half of studies, but instead of immediately transferring to another school, Ride decided to try her hand at professional tennis! Here’s a moment that makes Sally so relatable. She discovered that going pro was just not the right decision for her. Not because she wasn’t talented, but because the endless hours of practice just didn’t spark that same curiosity she’d had staring at the stars. Even during this sporty detour, you can see her intellectual pull. While playing tennis, she took classes at University of California, Los Angeles, one in quantum mechanics, and another in Shakespeare. 

By the fall of 1970, she was ready to return to school, this time at Stanford University, where she was admitted to the all-male physics departments. And yes, she kept playing tennis there. Unlike the men’s team, which played on well-maintained courts in the middle of campus, and whose members received scholarships, Sally and the women’s team received no financial support from the school. Members of the women’s team had to pay for everything themselves. But, this was the norm for women’s sports in the 1960s and 1970s. 

In 1973, Ride graduated from Stanford with a bachelor's degree in both physics and English . She stayed on at Stanford to continue her studies in physics, earning her master’s degree in 1975 and completing her Ph.D. in 1978. Her graduate work focused on free-electron lasers, devices that generate powerful beams of light by sending clusters of electrons through magnetic fields. While finishing her Ph.D., she spotted an intriguing ad in the student newspaper. NASA was recruiting astronauts, and for the first time in the agency's history, women were explicitly invited to apply. Have you ever come across an opportunity that just felt right? That instant spark, heart racing and butterflies in your stomach, like something just clicked into place? That’s exactly what Sally Ride felt when she read that ad.

Eventually, more than eight thousand people applied to NASA in 1977. Thirty-five were selected. Six of them were women, including Ride. She was only twenty-six years old. In 1978, she officially joined NASA as part of Astronaut Group 8, the first class to include not only women, but also people of color, marking a historic shift in who was seen as capable of representing humanity in space.

That shift didn’t happen in isolation—it was part of a much larger story unfolding across the United States. The 1960s and 1970s were decades of profound social and political upheaval. Civil rights activists were dismantling legalized segregation, second-wave feminists were challenging long-standing barriers in education, employment, and public life, and gay rights activists were beginning to openly demand recognition, dignity, and equal protection under the law.

At the same time, federal policy began to catch up with these demands for equality. Laws like Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs, as well as stronger enforcement of equal employment rules started to pry open institutions that had long excluded women and people of color. Even an organization as tradition-bound as NASA couldn’t remain untouched.

For years, the astronaut corps had been drawn almost exclusively from white male military test pilots. But by the late 1970s, that model was being questioned. The arrival of the space shuttle program signaled a shift in priorities, with greater emphasis on science, engineering, and mission specialists rather than just test pilots. Meanwhile, pressure was building—from activists, from lawmakers, and from the public—for NASA to better reflect the country it served. All of these forces converged at once. The result was a turning point: the opening of the astronaut corps to a far more diverse group of candidates, reshaping who got to go to space and, just as importantly, who got to be seen as part of that future.

In the summer of 1978, just weeks after earning her Ph.D., Sally Ride arrived at Johnson Space Center in Houston as part of a new astronaut class that would jokingly dub itself the “Thirty-Five New Guys.” Training was intense and wide-ranging, designed to prepare astronauts for just about anything space, or Earth, might throw at them. The candidates learned parachute jumping and water survival, trained in weightlessness, and studied everything from radio communications and navigation to biochemistry and oceanography. They even took to the skies in NASA’s T-38 jets, where flying at speeds over 500 miles per hour forced them to make split-second decisions under pressure. For Ride, the program was a natural fit. A former athlete with a sharp scientific mind, she stood out for her composure and focus in high-stress situations, qualities that would become essential in spaceflight.

Here is Ride reflecting on what the training was really like:

Sally Ride: We have a lot of different types of training programs, but most of them are training programs to learn about the space shuttle. So they're programs that put you in the classroom a lot, just learning things. There are programs that put you in the simulators, practicing what you've learned. A simulator is exactly like a space shuttle. It's run by computers and we walk into a room that looks just like the space shuttle with all the dials and switches and knobs in exactly the right places. And we practice everything that we're going to do on orbit. We've also got training programs that have us fly in the training jets that NASA has. And we've got a water survival program that goes along with flying in those training jets. And altogether, those programs take maybe three or four years once you become an astronaut before you're really ready for a space flight.

KB: By 1981, Sally Ride had taken on a critical role inside Mission Control: CAPCOM, short for capsule communicator, the voice astronauts hear from Earth. From that console, she guided crews aboard Space Shuttle Columbia during the STS-2 mission in November 1981 and again on STS-3 in March 1982, helping translate the complex choreography of spaceflight into clear, concise instructions. Ride had to know everything about that shuttle: every system, every drawer and its contents, and how to repair any and every part of it.  One of her more lighthearted tasks was selecting the wake-up music for the crews. One of her choices was “Pigs in Space,” from the Muppet Show.

Then, on April 19, 1982, Sally had the meeting of a lifetime. George Abbey, NASA’s director of flight operations at Johnson Space Center, called Ride into his office and delivered the news: she had been selected to join a shuttle crew! She would fly as a mission specialist on STS-7 aboard Space Shuttle Challenger. What followed was more than a year of demanding preparation. Ride and her crewmates, Commander Robert Crippen, pilot Frederick Hauck, and fellow mission specialists John Fabian and Norman Thagard, cycled through simulation after simulation. Every scenario, from routine procedures to worst-case emergencies, was rehearsed until their responses became second nature.

In the weeks leading up to her historic journey into orbit, Sally Ride found herself at the center of an extraordinary media storm. The United States was on the brink of sending its first woman into space, and the public fascination was intense. Ride’s image appeared on the covers of major publications like Newsweek, People, and Ms., and she appeared or  was interviewed on every major television news program.  At the NASA press conference announcing her selection, reporters asked her some truly outrageous questions. Instead of focusing on the technical demands of the mission or her scientific training, many reporters fixated on her gender. The questions she faced often revealed the era’s underlying assumptions about women: Would she cry under pressure? Could spaceflight interfere with her ability to have children? Would she wear makeup in space?

Ride handled these moments with a composure that became part of her legacy. During one memorable exchange, a reporter asked her bluntly, “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?” Although annoyed with this line of questioning, Ride just laughed. Then, gesturing toward her crewmate Rick Hauck, she delivered a pointed, witty reply: “Why don’t people ask Rick those questions?” The room broke into laughter, but the message was unmistakable. Ride faced intense media scrutiny, as she described in a 1983 interview with Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. Magazine.  

Sally Ride: “Really, the only bad moments in our training involved the press. The press was an added pressure on the flight for me. And whereas NASA appeared to be very enlightened about flying women astronauts, the press didn't appear to be. The things that they were concerned with were not the same things that I was concerned with.” 

Gloria Steinem: “For instance, the bathroom facilities.” 

Sally Ride: “Bathroom facilities.”

Gloria Steinem: “How much did you get asked that?”

Sally Ride: “Just about every interview I got asked that. Everybody wanted to know about what kind of makeup I was taking up. They didn't care about how well prepared I was to operate the arm or deploy communication satellites.”

KB: Finally, the day arrived, July 18, 1983. ‘Four thousand people gathered at Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch, including Sally’s parents, her sister, her husband, astronaut Steve Hawley, and many of her friends from her tennis life and her academic life, including her old friend, Tam O’Shaunnessy. The countdown began, the engines roared to life, and Sally Ride made history aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. At just 32 years old, she became the first American woman in space. 

Sally accomplished another first on this mission, when she became the first astronaut to use the 50-foot robot arm to retrieve a satellite from orbit. This was highly technical, high-stakes work, and she would know, since she was part of the team that designed the arm! 

Sally Ride: I've been on two space shuttle flights so far and my duties were pretty much the same on both of them. I'm one of the scientist astronauts and on both flights I was the astronaut who helped out during launch and entry, kind of like a flight engineer on an airplane. So I read the checklists and read the procedures on our way into orbit, on launch, and on our way back from orbit on entry. Once we were in orbit, on my first flight, I helped release two communication satellites that we carried. We carried one for the country of Indonesia and one for Canada. And I also used the robot arm, 50 foot long arm, to pick a satellite up out of the space shuttle and release it back into orbit and then catch it again. Then on my second flight, we carried the robot arm again and I got to use it to release another satellite.

KB: Ride’s celebrity status only grew after the launch. When Sally finally soared into orbit aboard STS-7, she didn’t just make history, she became an instant cultural icon. Practically overnight, she was one of the most recognizable faces in America. Crowds gathered wherever she went, and the invitations poured in. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a moment with the first American woman in space.

In the weeks following the mission, Ride and her crewmates were swept into a whirlwind tour that felt part scientific celebration, part celebrity circuit. One of the most symbolic stops was the White House, where they were welcomed by President Ronald Reagan. The visit underscored just how significant the mission had been, not only for NASA, but for the country’s sense of progress and possibility during the Cold War era. But Ride’s fame didn’t stay confined to formal ceremonies and political photo ops. She also became a pop culture icon! In a moment that delighted younger audiences and cemented her place in American life beyond science, she appeared on Sesame Street. There, the astronaut who had operated the shuttle’s robotic arm in orbit now spoke directly to children, making space feel a little closer, a little more real, and perhaps, for many girls watching, a little more attainable. What made Ride’s celebrity so remarkable was how she carried it. With the same calm confidence she had shown in orbit and in those early press conferences, she used her visibility to subtly reshape expectations about women in STEM fields.

Rides' next flight lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on October 5, 1984. Space shuttle Flight STS-41-G aboard the Challenger was another flight full of firsts. It was the first mission to include two female astronauts, Sally and Kathy Sullivan, another one of the first women selected for astronaut training, along with Ride. Kathy Sullivan also became the first woman to walk in space--or in space lingo, perform extra-vehicular activity--on October 11. Sally used the robot arm to launch a 5000lb satellite out of the space shuttle cargo bay and into orbit. This particular satellite was full of scientific instruments that would be used to study the planet, measuring Earth's ozone layer and studying the flow of heat from the warm Tropics to the cooler North and South polar regions. During her missions, Sally also kept a journal that listed all of the “Space Foods” she liked and disliked. Some of the things she liked included strawberries, cookies, vegetables, rice pilaf, and mac and cheese. She was less impressed with cereal, canned tuna, and the Instant Breakfast concoction. 

Being an astronaut didn’t just mean flying missions; it also meant life on the road. For Sally Ride, that included a steady stream of speaking engagements, school visits, and public appearances. As invitations poured in, Ride would scan them for something more personal: opportunities to reconnect with the people who mattered most. One city kept rising to the top of the list: Atlanta. That’s where her longtime friend Tam O'Shaughnessy lived. At first, the visits were just that, friendly reunions woven into a busy schedule. But over time, as those trips became more frequent, something deeper began to take shape. After all, their story stretched back decades. They first met as teenagers, standing side by side in line to check in for a tennis tournament in Southern California. Neither of them could have known then that this chance meeting would turn into a lifelong connection. In between the speeches and appearances, the two found time to have dinner together, go to the movies, and take walks. They soon came to realize that this wasn’t just friendship anymore. They were in love. But Sally was still married, and NASA still had big plans for Sally, so romance would have to wait. 

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members, including Judith Resnick, another woman admitted to astronaut training with Sally and Kathy Sullivan. It was a national tragedy and a pivotal moment in NASA’s history. Ride was appointed to the Rogers Commission, which investigated the disaster. She was the only former astronaut on the commission. Ride played a crucial but often understated role. She helped uncover that faulty O-rings, the rubber seals in the solid rocket boosters, failed in unusually cold temperatures. She also exposed communication breakdowns within NASA and between engineers and management.

In an instant, the shuttle program was grounded, and NASA was forced into a long, uncertain period of investigation and rebuilding. Ride had been scheduled for a third mission, but she realized after the Challenger disaster that it was going to take NASA a long time to recover. She had no idea when, or if, she would ever return to space. By the spring of 1987, she made a decision that surprised many. At just 36 years old, she retired from NASA. But that wasn’t the only turning point. Around the same time, Ride made a deeply personal decision to end her marriage to Steve Hawley. It was a quiet transition compared to the very public milestones of her career, but no less significant. As one era of her life came to an end, another, more private, and more authentic, was just beginning.

After leaving NASA in 1987, Sally Ride didn’t step away from science. Instead, she reshaped how science was presented to young audiences. She joined the faculty at University of California, San Diego, where she became a professor of physics and later director of the California Space Institute. Tam relocated from Atlanta to teach biology at San Diego Mesa College. Sally had become deeply aware of how few girls were encouraged to pursue science, and both she and Tam shared a passion for making STEM more accessible.

In 2001, the two co-founded Sally Ride Science along with Dr. Karen Flammer and two other friends. The organization is dedicated to increasing STEM literacy and inspiring young people, especially girls and minorities, to explore careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. Through camps, teacher training, and engaging classroom materials, they worked to make science feel accessible and exciting, not intimidating or out of reach. Sally and Tam also collaborated on several science books for young readers, combining clear explanations with a sense of wonder about the natural world and space exploration. In this 1984 interview , Sally explained the importance of engaging in science and math classes from an early age:  

Sally Ride: Science and math are really important. Even back in elementary and junior high school, because if you don't take those courses back then, then you won't have the opportunity when you get to high school and college to study the things that you need to study to become an astronaut. My background is in physics and astronomy. A lot of astronauts have backgrounds in medicine or geology or oceanography. What's important is to get the science and math in whatever scientific field you're interested in. Take lots of algebra courses, geometry courses, that kind of thing, and prepare yourself for the science.

KB: Ride also played a central role in creating and championing EarthKAM, a program designed to let students see Earth from space through their own eyes. In the mid-1990s, while teaching at University of California, San Diego, Ride asked: What if students could actually control a camera aboard a spacecraft? Instead of just reading about Earth science, they could investigate it directly. That idea became EarthKAM, short for “Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students.” The program flew a camera on space shuttle missions, allowing students around the world to request photographs of specific locations on Earth. They could then use those images to study geography, weather patterns, environmental change, and human impact on the planet. The first test flights took place aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1995, and the program was later moved to the International Space Station. Sadly, after 30 amazing years, EarthKAM’s final mission, its 92nd, took place in July 2025.

Sally and Tam’s personal and professional partnership lasted for 27 years until Sally passed away on July 23, 2012, at the age of 61 after battling pancreatic cancer. In recognition of her extraordinary legacy, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by Barack Obama, honoring both her pioneering role in spaceflight and her enduring contributions to education and equality. Tam accepted the Medal on Sally’s behalf, after these inspiring remarks from President Obama:

President Obama: Thirty years ago, Dr. Sally K. Ride soared into space as the youngest American and first woman to wear the Stars and Stripes above Earth’s atmosphere.  As an astronaut, she sought to keep America at the forefront of space exploration.  As a role model, she fought tirelessly to inspire young people -- especially girls -- to become scientifically literate and to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.  At the end of her life, she became an inspiration for those battling pancreatic cancer, and for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community.  The tale of a quiet hero, Sally Ride’s story demonstrates that the sky is no limit for those who dream of reaching for the stars.

KB: In March 2026, four astronauts circled the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program. We can trace the success of that thrilling mission, with its diverse international crew of astronauts, directly back to the legacy of pioneers like Sally Ride, whose historic journey helped redefine who belongs in space. By breaking barriers as the first American woman astronaut, Ride not only expanded opportunities within NASA for those that came after her, but also challenged long-standing assumptions about gender in science and exploration. Ride’s legacy resonates strongly as NASA grows more inclusive, recognizing the contributions of women and LGBTQ+ individuals alike. In every chapter of her life, Sally Ride expanded access—to space, to science, and to possibility.

DF: Kathleen Barker is History UnErased’s program director and podcast host, and is a library and information specialist and public historian with over 20 years of experience as a museum and library educator.  This podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack, our youth equity program director and podcaster. Our theme music is “1986” by BrothaD via Tribe of Noise. 

We would love to hear from you! Email hello@unerased.org and let us know where in the world you are listening, or what history we can highlight in a future episode from your corner of the world. That’s hello@unerased.org - and please rate this podcast and share! 

I’m Deb Fowler. Thanks for listening. 

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